This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.

Tuesday December 22 -- Got news or an update?

49 comments:

The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.

Fannie Mae was established in 1938 You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.

War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they are still poor.

Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.

Freddie Mac was established in 1970You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.

The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every "Government Service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars: AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?

The Democratic Party’s decades-long push to remake the U.S. health care system cleared a major hurdle early Monday morning, with the Senate voting to advance a massive $871 billion bill to extend coverage to nearly all Americans and tighten regulations on private insurers.

Less than two days after releasing a bill with 383 pages of changes, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) corralled his politically diverse caucus and delivered the 60votes necessary for the most crucial test vote in the legislative process so far — effectively assuring the reform package will clear the Senate later this week.

The final tally was a straight party-line vote, 60-40. All Democrats and two independents voted yes and all Republicans voted no – and each side bitterly accused the other of trying to thwart true reform through petty gamesmanship.

The senators voted just after 1 a.m. while seated at their desks, a rarely used practice implemented only for historic votes.

The last we heard nobody has still seen the bill except for Harry Reid and his top staffers.

Remember this for the next time you’re told there is not a dimes worth of difference between the two parties.

$871 billion is a lot of dimes.

It’s always great to see the Democrats following Saul Alinsky’s playbook. He regularly stressed the importance of making ‘nobodies’ feel like they were involved in a great historic movement.

If the Senate passes the bill as expected – after two more procedural votes this week and a final vote set for 7 p.m.

Christmas Eve – House and Senate negotiators will begin the arduous process of melding two substantially different bills.

Democrats are optimistic they can reach a final compromise, but that is by no means assured.

Senate Democrats have already warned the House that they had better not touch his bill. So much for ‘melding.’

Just moments before the vote, Reid said, “We have before us the ability to provide quality health care to every American, and we have the ability to treat our unhealthy health care system.

That’s what this historic bill does.”

Which, of course, is completely untrue. This bill just mandates that everyone buy health insurance or face a fine or prison.

Liberal Politics at Its Best… Nearly Half of Detroit Is Unemployed( GatewayPundit)

Is it time for a Detroit bailout? After years of democrat control and influence nearly half of the population in Detroit is unemployed.

The Detroit News reported: Despite an official unemployment rate of 27percent, the real jobs problem in Detroit may be affecting half of the working-age population, thousands of whom either can’t find a job or are working fewer hours than they want.

Using a broader definition of unemployment, as much as 45 percent of the labor force has been affected by the downturn.

And that doesn’t include those who gave up the job search more than a year ago, a number that could exceed 100,000 potential workers alone.

“It’s a big number, and we should be concerned about it whether it’s one in two or something less than that,” said George Fulton, a University of Michigan economist who helps craft economic forecasts for the state.

Mayor Dave Bing recently raised eyebrows when he said what many already suspected: that the city’s official unemployment rate was as believable as Santa Claus.

In Washington for a jobs forum earlier this month, he estimated it was “closer to 50 percent.”

Now Obama and democrats want to spread that same liberal philosophy that ruined Detroit across the nation.

Gartman: Blame Democratic Mayors For Nationwide Poverty (The Business Insider)

In this morning The Gartman Letter, analyst Dennis Gartman segues off his usual topic of markets to focus on poverty levels and the political front: The Gartman Letter:

Finally, we came across the following list over the weekend as we were going through e-mails and cleaning things up.

We checked out the data, and it is correct, so the “correlation” seems reasonably to hold.

Now, what do all of these cities have in common beyond their egregious poverty level rates?

They all have had since 1989 and continue to have, Democrat Party mayors...with Cleveland having had the Democrat mayor incumbent for the shortest period, since 1989, while Newark and Milwaukee now go back for nearly one hundred years of Democrat “rule.”

Detroit, with the highest poverty rate has had a Democrat running the city government since 1961.

We’re not casting aspersions here; we are simply drawing correlations.

By now you have probably heard about the mystery appropriation for a ‘$100,000,000 research medical facility’ buried in the Senate’s healthcare reform bill.

We now get the answer to this mystery from a gently amused(AP)

Dodd Gets $100 Million For UConn Health Center Put In Bill

WASHINGTON — A $100 million item for construction of a university hospital was inserted in the Senate health care bill at the request of Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who faces a difficult re-election campaign, his office said Sunday night.

The legislation leaves it up to the Health and Human Services Department to decide where the money should be spent, although spokesman Bryan DeAngelis said Dodd hopes to claim it for the University of Connecticut.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any uglier we get the cash for cloture tally...

The CBO reported that Harry Reid spent $1.2 billion to buy off democrats for the Obamacare vote last night.

They got their nationalized health care bill and it only cost you $1.2billion for their vote!The Hill reported, via Sweetness and Light:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) informed lawmakers on Sunday night that the section of the manager’s amendment to the Senate’s health bill would cost $1.2 billion over 10 years.

Nelson managed to win a share of the section of the manager’s amendment on Equitable Support for Certain States, which will provide Nebraska, along with Massachusetts and Vermont, support in paying its share of additional costs to Medicaid in the health legislation.

The provision, which Republicans have derided as the “Cornhusker Kickback,” actually provides Nebraska the least of the three states.

Vermont will receive $600 million over 10 years, while Massachusetts will receive $500 million. The money to Nebraska had previously been reported to be $45 million.

Health Care: Democrats on the take and in the dead of night pass an execrable piece of legislation that they haven't read, the public doesn't want and only socialists could love. What has happened to this country?

If we hadn't stayed up past midnight Sunday, we wouldn't have known what was going on.

Here we thought a vote on the proposed health care overhaul wasn't going to take place until Thursday night — Christmas Eve.

But there they were, the United States Senate, at 1 a.m. Monday, rushing to vote in the middle of a snowstorm to close debate on the most important piece of legislation of our time — the nationalization of the U.S. health care system. And we've been scrambling ever since to make sense of it.

Let's see if we have this right:

• This was a vote on a Democrat-concocted scheme that Americans have rejected every time it's been proposed for 100 years and that is opposed again, by 54% to 41% by the public at large, by 2-to-1 by practicing physicians and by every last member on the Republican side of the aisle.

Chairman of RNC says Democrats are 'flipping bird to Americans'(digitaljournal.com)

Chairman of the Republican Natiional Committee Michael Steele said the Democratic Party is "flipping the bird to Americans" over their latest health care reform bill, despite the jump in support over the legislation.

The latest move to reform health care in the United States has caused grief, anger and rage among leaders in Washington and the American people as the health care debate moves into its final stages and a possible conclusion come Christmas Eve.

Michael Steele, Chairman of the RNC, spoke in a conference call on Monday with reporters saying that the Democrats’ procedures on Sunday to pass health care reform legislation amounts to “flipping a bird to the American people,” according to CNN.

“This is a bad bill. It's bad law. It's bad for America. It is bad certainly for individuals and enough is enough.

I am tired of the Congress thumbing their nose and flipping a bird to the American people.”

Note: President Obama said this on the same day that democrats spent $1.2 billion to bribe fellow democrats for to vote for Obamacare!

From the Man who tripled the national deficit in less than one year we get a lecture on spending...

On the same day that democrats voted for the largest expansion of government in decades.

Via HotAirPundit: Obama says we can’t keep spending hard-earned taxpayer money like its Monopoly money. Can we all agree now that this man has no conscience?

TIME Mag has the transcript: When my administration walked through the door, the country faced a growing economic downturn as well as a deepening fiscal hole.

Washington had passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy (producers) and an expensive new entitlement program without paying for any of it.

Health care costs continued to rise, year after year. And little effort was made to cut wasteful spending. As a result, over the previous eight years, the national debt doubled — doubled.

In January, the deficit stood at $1.3 trillion. And we had to make the difficult decision to add to the deficit in the short term to prevent the potential collapse of our economy.

But as I’ve said, in the long run, we can’t continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences; as if waste doesn’t matter; as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money. That’s what we’ve seen time and time again.

Washington has been more concerned about the next election than the next generation. It’s put off hard choices in spending bill after spending bill, budget after bloated budget.

By the way...Obama lied about the CBO estimate in his talk.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “The Congressional Budget Office Now Reports That This Bill Will Reduce Our Deficit By $132 Billion Over The First Decade And By As Much As $1.3 Trillion In The Decade After That.” (President Obama, Remarks, 12/21/09)

“CBO Has Discovered An Error” That “Reduces The Degree To Which The Legislation Would Lower Federal Deficits”

CBO: “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Has Discovered An Error In The Cost Estimate Released On December 19, 2009, Related To The Longer-Term Effects On Direct Spending Of The Manager’s Amendment To The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Senate Amendment 2786 in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 3590 (as printed in the Congressional Record on November 19, 2009).

Correcting that error has no impact on the estimated effects of the legislation during the 2010–2019 period.

However, the correction reduces the degree to which the legislation would lower federal deficits in the decade after 2019.” (CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, Letter To Sen. Harry Reid, 12/20/09, P. 1)

CBO: “A Detailed Year-By-Year Projection For Years Beyond 2019, Like Those That CBO Prepares For The 10-Year Budget Window, Would Not Be Meaningful Because The Uncertainties Involved Are Simply Too Great.” (CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, Letter To Sen. Harry Reid, 12/19/09, P. 15)

This news was released yesterday. Surely the White House heard the news before Obama gave his speech.

I saw this a few days ago on FreeRepblic and was shocked. I’ve seen many Republican idiots, but this heath care socialism makes me quite angry

The socialist revolution has come to America. It has been a long time coming.

On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin came down — the Cold War was over. In the United States, the political left, dismayed from the collapse of its great patron, retrenched and transmogrified with the times, choosing for their president a free-trading, welfare-reforming moderate.

But this was but a feint; the era of big government was not over.

The left had not learned its lesson, had not abandoned its dreams of absolute control. It seethed and stewed...and waited.

The new century dawned in fire when the twin towers came down.

America lashed out, sending large armies into Asia and Arabia. Like all wars, fortunes waxed and waned.

But the iPod generation has not the capacity to endure the waning.

By the time Mesopotamia was stabilizing, it was too late; the American public had abandoned the war it had once supported.

The commander-in-chief who took America into battle with Congress and the people behind him left office ridiculed and reviled.

Many will tell you that it was the financial crisis that led to the election of Obama in 2008...

It was G.K. Chesterton who once observed that "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything."

That is what immediately comes to mind reading this article by Matt Smith in the current issue of SF Weekly about the nationwide network of "community organizations" that really serve as fronts for the Marxist National Labor Federation (NatlFed).

And NatlFed has no shortage of Leftist dupes willing to work on their behalf in unwitting service to their Marxist agenda.

It's a long article, but a very interesting read. No doubt there are some on the right side of the web who will try to spin this into some Obama-led conspiracy (which I won't indulge in), but what I find particularly interesting is how gullible many of these Left wing elitists really are.

These are the same people who screeched about the looming theocratic takeover of America during the Bush admin, but who fall all over themselves helping scammers like NatlFed, which advocates for the violent overthrow of the US government.

The San Francisco limousine leftist set are exactly the same bozos who fell for another Marxist cult back in the late 1960s and 1970s - Jim Jones and the People's Temple.

And that didn't end so well as I recall (e.g. the Marxist utopia of Jonestown).

From the article:Why the seeming secrecy?

Knowledgeable sources say that the Physicians Organizing Committee is one of several Bay Area front groups set up to disguise a strange political cult.

Although a representative for the committee has denied the link, it has shared personnel with an alleged cult front group, and received a grant from the National Equal Justice Association (NEJA), a nonprofit shell corporation linked to the cult. (The committee's manager, meanwhile, has donated money to NEJA.)

Committee representatives also deal with the press using a protocol consistent with rules laid down by the cult.

The cult, an umbrella organization based in New York, goes by names such as the Provisional Communist Party and the National Labor Federation, abbreviated as NatlFed.

WASHINGTON -- Slumping in the polls and struggling to pass climate and financial legislation, President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders are counting on an historic health care victory to buoy their electoral prospects in 2010.

But Republicans argued Sunday that the issue is breaking their way, and liberal infighting indicates the party leadership has to win back its base along with the larger electorate.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls.

The apparent success by Senate Democrats this weekend in securing the necessary votes to pass a sweeping overhaul of health care before Christmas will offset setbacks on climate change and financial industry regulation, Democrats say.

Senator Sholdon Whitehouse (D-RI) slammed the 55% of Americans who oppose the democrat’s government takeover of health care.

On the Senate Floor Whitehouse said those who opposed Obamacare were (racist) birthers, right-wing militias and aryan groups.

The Washington Times reported:After explaining why absent GOP members who did not vote for the Department of Defense spending bill was tantamount to a “no” vote, he went on to say that Republicans and their supporters just want to “break” the momentum of President Obama.:

“Voting ‘no’ and hiding from the vote are the same result. Those of us on the floor see it.

It was clear the three of them who did not cast their yes votes until all 60 Senate votes had been tallied and it was clear that the result was a foregone conclusion.

And why? Why all this discord and discourtesy, all this unprecedented destructive action? All to break the momentum of our new young president.

They are desperate to break this president. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama.

The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist.

On December 21, 2009, however, Harry Reid sold out the Republic in toto.

Upon examination of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment to the health care legislation, Senators discovered section 3403. That section changes the rules of the United States Senate.

To change the rules of the United States Senate, there must be sixty-seven votes (67).

Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment requires that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.”

The good news is that this only applies to one section of the Obamacare legislation.

The bad news is that it applies to regulations imposed on doctors and patients by the Independent Medical Advisory Boards a/k/a the Death Panels.

Section 3403 of Senator Reid’s legislation also states, “Notwithstanding rule XV of the Standing Rules of the Senate, a committee amendment described in subparagraph (A) may include matter not within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Finance if that matter is relevant to a proposal contained in the bill submitted under subsection (c)(3).”

Cuba's foreign minister called President Barack Obama an "imperial and arrogant" liar Monday for his conduct at the U.N. climate conference, a reflection of the communist island's increasingly fiery verbal attacks on the U.S. government.

Bruno Rodriguez spent an hour and a half lambasting Obama's behavior in Copenhagen, telling a news conference, "at this summit, there was only imperial, arrogant Obama, who does not listen, who imposes his positions and even threatens developing countries."

He called the summit "a fallacy, a farce" and said Washington used back-room deals and strong-arm tactics to foist on the world a deal that he labeled "undemocratic" and "suicidal" because it urges — but does not require — major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts.

It might be hard to believe for Americans who are used to Obama-worshipping from their MSM, but European media have blamed President Barack Obama for the fiasco at Copenhagen.

This even though they celebrated his victory against Sen. John McCain last year as if he were the second coming of the Messiah.

The narrative taking hold is this: Although Obama may have thought of himself as The Great Savior, who’d convince the international community to agree on a plan to fight global warming, he accomplished the exact opposite by acting like a pompous ass.

German newspaper Welt words it as follows:

The collapse of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen is a serious defeat for US President Barack Obama at the international level... Worse, he let the Chinese make him look like a fool...

Instead a fiasco had begun making itself visible and felt...

According to rumors in the Bella Center, US President Barack Obama at about 11 PM, had impatiently asked to speak with Wen Jiabao in order to advance the discussion. But Obama had to wait. Wen, who, it was rumored, had rarely left his hotel room, could not be found.

Finally, the US delegation located him in a room set aside for negotiations. A visibly furious Obama, according to reports, stormed into the room. “Are you now ready to talk with me, Premier Wen?” he was reported to have shouted. “Are you now ready?

Premier Wen, are you now ready to talk with me?” What a scene for a US president

For scientists to remain credible, they have to have a certain detachment from their work.

At the very least, they have to have no vested interests in any particular outcome, or they risk biasing their work to produce outcomes favorable to themselves.

On anthropogenic global warming, we already have advocates like Al Gore who stand to make billions of dollars by convincing governments to impose cap-and-trade systems that will rely on their businesses for the service — but advocates aren’t scientists.

However, the Telegraph reports today that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and who is considered the top climate scientist in the world, has a wide portfolio of business interests that rely on AGW hysteria:

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The extensive reach that Pachauri has created calls into question both his credentials and his motives.

Why did the UN pick a former railway engineer with no background in climate science to lead its effort on AGW?

Clearly, Pachauri was selected for his influence rather than his scientific expertise.

Climategate exposed the chicanery of AGW science at East Anglia CRU, including the attempts to hide contradictory data and smear critics.

This exposes a critical conflict of interest in the UN effort built on the CRU’s data.

In that sense, Pachauri might be the perfect pick to lead the effort.

It’s all about economics, not the climate or science at all. It’s an excuse to impose a massive transfer of wealth from developed nations to Third World dictatorships, and people like Pachauri have positioned themselves to get rich on the transactions.

The advertising hits just keep on coming for TV stations, networks and programmers -- and not in a good way.

Overall, broadcast television ad revenues were down 22.6% to $8.8 billion in the third quarter, versus the same time period a year ago, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising.

Local TV stations slipped 28.1% to $3.1 billion, with network TV off 21.5% to $4.7 billion. The best news came with syndicated TV, which dropped a modest 7.2% to $1.0billion.

The period was particularly rough compared to the broader nine-month period in 2009 to date, per TVB. Over this period, network TV dropped 10.7%, syndicated TV was off 2.8%, and local broadcast TV plummeted 27.4%.

This brings an overall nine-month loss for broadcast TV to 15.7%, at $28.9 billion.

The presses stopped forever at no less than 142 daily and weekly newspapers in 2009, a nearly threefold increase over the number of titles succumbing in the prior year.

The reasons, of course, were the double whammy of the worst economy since the 1930s and a dramatic secular shift in the habits of readers and advertisers.

Bad as things were – and they were plenty bad if you lost your job at the Rocky Mountain News, the Washington (DC) Blade, El Dia in Houston, the Boca Raton (FL) News, the Hopi Tutuveni in Arizona or the Derby (KS) Daily Reporter – the toll seemed smaller than some observers expected.

There are three reasons for that, as discussed more fully below: the residual monopoly power of the industry, the magic of the bankruptcy system and the irrepressible optimism of publishers.

Though things might have been worse, the year was bleak enough for newspapers – and the newspaper workers who were among the more than 90,000 people who lost their jobs in the various print publishing industries in the last 12 months.

The contours of the carnage come into particularly stark relief at Paper Cuts, an invaluable website produced by the talented and indefatigable Erica Smith.

Smith has put a black pin on a map of the United States for just about every paper shuttered since 2008.

Last year, the map contained 37 pins. This year, it was filled with 106 pins in every corner of the country, including several single pins representing the shutdown of multiple weeklies published by a common owner.

Although Smith’s count may not be absolutely inclusive, the dozens of black dots on her map dramatically illustrate the breadth and depth of the industry crisis.

In all, Smith tallied 142 daily and non-daily shutdowns in 2009, or 2.7 times more than the 53 papers she listed in 2008.

At yearend 2008, there were 1,408 dailies published in the United States, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

The black pins include not only the high-profile Rocky Mountain News, but also such smaller dailies as the Tucson Citizen, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Baltimore Examiner and the East Iowa Herald.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Christian Science Monitor, the Ann Arbor News and Asian Week abandoned print in favor of scaled-back online operations in the hopes of carrying their franchises forward on the web.

More than 100 non-daily publications were closed, ranging from tiny independent publications in places like Iraan, TX and Kykotsmovi, AZ, to weeklies operated as satellites to dailies owned by Journal Register Co., the Sun-Times Media Group, Lee Enterprises, Hearst and Gannett.

Smith is reporting that nearly 15,000 newspaper jobs were lost this year on top of a like number in 2009.

But the federal employment statistics suggest the toll may well be higher. As of the end of November, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said 90,000 jobs were lost in the non-Internet publishing industries, which would include books and magazines, as well as newspapers.

Pink slips continued to fly even as Christmas approached.

Tough as things were, some observers wonder that they weren’t worse. One of them is Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, who observed in an email query over the weekend that “it seems as though fewer newspapers went out of business than might have been expected.”

There are three are major reasons why the papers carrying on are still carrying on.

The U.N. Climate Control Conference in Copenhagen ended in failure in that no binding agreement was reached to reduce CO2emissions.

China nixed the agreement by refusing to compromise on the issue of international verification as noted by a British newspaper called The Independent:

When the [U.S.] President, in an unyielding speech, said that without international verification "any agreement would be empty words on a page", that was too much for [Chinese Premier] Mr Wen.

He left the conference in Copenhagen's Bella Centre, returned to his hotel in the city, and responded with a direct snub of his own - he sent low-level delegates to take his place in the talks.

At the end of the conference, President Obama and leaders of India, Brazil, South Africa, and China negotiated a possible framework for the next conference.

In order to be seen as effective, Obama caved in to the demands of the developing countries, which produced the "Copenhagen Accord."

India, Brazil, and South Africa got the reparations they wanted.

The developed countries (the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc.) would pay $30 billion by 2012, and $100 billion per year starting in 2020 (U.S. share $10 billion by 2012, about $33 billion per year by 2020), into a fund to be distributed to the developing countries based upon need.

The accord states: The collective commitment by developed countries is to provide new and additional resources, including forestry and investments through international institutions, approaching $30 billion for the period 2010-2012

... In the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, developed countries support a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.

Meanwhile, China, the world's fastest-growing CO2-polluter, got what it wanted...

ACORN critic Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is mystified that both the Democratic-controlled Congress and the Obama administration aren't doing much about the tax-subsidized organized crime syndicate ACORN even as evidence of its wrongdoing continues to pile up.

In an exclusive interview, the House Judiciary Committee member describes the ACORN saga as "the largest corruption crisis in the history of America."

"It's thousands of times bigger than Watergate because Watergate was only a little break-in by a couple of guys," said King.

"By the time we pull ACORN out by its roots America's going to understand just how big this is."

Unlike the Nixon-era Watergate scandal, the ACORN scandal reaches not only to the highest levels of government, but also to states and localities across America.

The president himself and his political advisor Patrick Gaspard used to work for ACORN and the radical advocacy group has allies throughout congressional leadership who are bending over backwards to protect it.

President Obama has also hired as White House counsel Bob Bauer, whom King described as "the number one defender of ACORN in the country." ...

Facing mounting criticism of a spending package packed with billions of dollars in earmarks, the Obama administration made a vow Sunday: This president will bring a halt to pork-laden bills.

"[Such bills] will not happen when the president has the full legislative and appropriations process in place," Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told CNN's "State of the Union with John King."

He argued that the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, which it inherited from the previous administration. The bill would keep the government running through 2009.

"This is like your relief pitcher coming into the ninth inning and wanting to redo the whole game," Orszag said. "Next year we're going to be the starting pitcher, and the game's going to be completely different."

Watch Orszag say it's too late to fight earmarks in this spending bill

But House Minority Whip Eric Cantor rejected the argument and noted that President Obama had vowed to take action against earmarks during the presidential campaign.

"If you make a promise, people expect that you live up to it. And that's why this administration's refusal to go in and change this bill, I think, is a false position," Cantor told "State of the Union."

"There is no way anyone could take what Mr. Orszag has said with any credibility," Cantor said.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's president on Tuesday dismissed a year-end deadline set by the Obama administration and the West for Tehran to accept a U.N.-drafted deal to swap enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, and claimed his government is now "10 times stronger" than a year ago.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks underscored Tehran's defiance amid the nuclear standoff — and also sought to send a message that his government had not been weakened by the protest movement sparked by June's disputed presidential election.

His comments came a day after the latest opposition protest by tens of thousands mourning a dissident cleric who died over the weekend.

President Barack Obama has set a rough deadline of the end of this year for Iran to respond to an offer of dialogue and show that it will allay fears of weapons development.

Washington and its allies are warning of new, tougher sanctions on Iran if it doesn't respond.

The U.N.-proposed deal is the centerpiece of the West's diplomatic effort. Under the deal, Tehran would ship most of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium abroad to be processed into fuel rods, which would ease the West's fears that the material could be used to produce a nuclear weapon.

***The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.***

LOL! The Post Office wasn't established to make a profit. It was established so everyone could get mail delivery -- even those living in rural areas where private companies couldn't make a profit without charging unaffordable rates. Kind of like medical insurance now for those unlucky enough to get sick or grow old. Oh, wait, that's their problem, isn't it?

Chicago shuts down, their former Senator/ACORN thug ops for Christmas in Hawaii. O-Duper's Chicago home purchaser helper Rezko, is in jail, no reason to be jolly in O’ Chi Town. ‘Change you can believe in’

Lib Reporter Connolly: White House Gave Sen. Dodd Sweetheart Deal To Help Him Win Re-Election

gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Jim Hoft

Liberal reporter Ceci Connolly admitted to Greta Van Susteren tonight that Senator Dodd received a $100 million sweetheart deal from the White House in the Obamacare bill to help him with his re-election. It’s nice to know that our taxpayer dollars are helping to support this corruptocrat’s reelection, huh? via: FreeRepublic.com

POLITICO has learned that Rep. Parker Griffith, a freshman Democrat from Alabama, will announce today that he’s switching parties to become a Republican. According to two senior GOP aides familiar with the decision, the announcement will take place this afternoon in Griffith's district in northern Alabama. Griffith’s party switch comes on the eve of a pivotal congressional health care vote and will send a jolt through a Democratic House Caucus that has already been unnerved by the recent retirements of a handful of members who, like Griffith, hail from districts that offer prime pickup opportunities for the GOP in 2010....

Media Daily News | Erik SassThe situation is dire when a 7.7% drop looks good. And that's where monthly magazines are in January, according to Media Industry Newsletter, which recently released ad page figures for the coming month's issues of about 115 monthlies. Of the 115 monthlies tracked by MIN in January, over half (62, or 54%) saw ad pages decline compared to January 2009. What's more, the losses were fairly top-heavy. While 17 of these titles (15% of the total), posted relatively modest declines of less than 10%, 15 (13%) experienced drops of 10%-20% and 30 (26%) tumbled over 20%. It's also noteworthy that...

What’s a day without catching a Tiger by the Tale? The tabloids beat the MSM to the story, so why not believe them now? I heard Tiger Woods is only a wee part black after all. Odd how that black skins fades with controversy. Look what happened to Michael Jackson.===Tiger Hooks up With Rachel again!

In Touch Weekly ^ | 12/22/09 Tiger Woods hasn’t shown his face since the news broke that he’d been cheating on his wife, Elin Nordegren, with as many as a dozen porn stars, cocktail waitresses and party girls. But Tiger isn’t in seclusion, depressed and watching cartoons, as many news outlets have reported — In Touch can exclusively reveal that he’s still secretly having sex with his mistress, New York party promoter Rachel Uchitel. “They have been sleeping together the entire time since the scandal broke,” her friend says. They hooked up in a condo she’s been staying at in Palm Beach.” http://www.intouchweekly.com/

11:47 AM Whatever he claims to be really doesn't matter. He is on record declaring himself as a "liberal" and at another speaking engagement a "progressive." He can't be trusted under any circumstance.

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